Trump and Jared’s Clearance

But the president doesn’t enjoy only “a fair amount of discretion” in granting security clearances to underlings, to quote the editors of the Washington Post. He has total discretion. The federal system of security clearances emerged from an executive order and so ultimately is derived from the president’s “executive power,” which the Constitution vests in him alone. Congress might codify how that power is wielded—as it did with the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, for example—but not in a manner that undermines the president’s authority.

Security-clearance decisions and procedures within an administration are inevitably subjective and sometimes maddeningly arbitrary. Ask anyone who has been denied a clearance. There is no appeals process. There are, however, limits to administrative power. If this weren’t the case, unelected bureaucrats could give orders to presidential appointees—the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense—about the creation and dispensation of their own classified material. These senior officials can classify or declassify their own material since they are assumed to carry the president’s blessing and therefore his executive power. A federal employee in the security office at Foggy Bottom cannot countermand how the secretary classifies material within the State Department.

Congress has its own privileges along these lines. Senior members and those on the national-security committees have access to classified material without having to pass background checks. They are elected and would rightly take umbrage at the president or, worse, counterintelligence bureaucrats in the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the CIA determining their suitability to handle secrets. Senior congressmen reserve the right to choose their own people and can, at least in theory, ignore the opinion of the FBI, which clears the legislative staffs. The president can’t order the House speaker not to show classified information to her team.

Many may wish Congress had more authority in these matters, thinking that Mr. Trump doesn’t possess the integrity to adjudicate security clearances or handle the most sensitive intelligence information. The president probably would be unable to pass a low-level security clearance if he were applying for a federal job due to his mendaciousness, his overseas real-estate ventures, and foreign investments in his domestic enterprises. But he’s not unique in this. Much of New York’s financial community, with its global exposure, would have a challenging time getting high-level clearances. Ditto for the legion of former senior executive-branch officials and members of Congress who have offered themselves to foreign governments and companies as consultants.

Moreover, the classification and the attendant clearance processes are an ungoverned, politically abusive, ever-expanding industry and have been since the 1980s at least. However intemperate and clumsy Mr. Trump may be, he is reasserting the authority of elected officials over the intelligence and security bureaucrats. It’s good for conservatives, who hitherto rarely questioned national-security institutions, to probe how the FBI and intelligence agencies generate and use classified information—whether for an investigation of a presidential candidate, national intelligence estimates or security clearances.

Alas, what has been gained on the right may now be lost on the left. Liberals, who have usually turned a harsher eye to the FBI and the CIA, are rallying to them primarily because they too think that Mr. Trump is an unbearable menace. But it shouldn’t be hard for liberals, especially progressives, to imagine scenarios where the FBI or CIA finds senior staff for an ultraliberal president to be ideologically compromised. A President Sanders might gather around him many folks with exuberantly unorthodox views about anti-American Third World regimes. In those instances, presidential authority stops unelected bureaucrats from overstepping their bounds. If the staff proves a catastrophe, the president and his party pay the price.

Mr. Trump has been profoundly unsettling, but he is the president, the ultimate “originating authority” behind all the nation’s secrets. And even in his missteps and mistakes, some good may well have been done.

Mr. Gerecht, a former CIA case officer, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.